Chapter XIII: Section 2: The Work of the Second Day

1. Creation includes not only the bringing into existence of matter, but all its undeveloped forces and changes. Revelation, upon this subject, is suggestive, rather than exhaustive, of what we need above what Nature shows, to trace creation back to God. The greatest difficulty in reading this poem understandingly, is in rightly rendering the phenomena noticed upon the second day. Figures of metonymy abound. As a rule, figures once used in prophecy are not changed when used by another prophet. Hence, we may derive benefit by seeing how other prophets have used them. Job had made the gathering of suns at the creation of light a morning in figure. Moses is about to use the same figure, and beholding the darkness of chaos preceding, he extended the figure to an evening preceding. This is the only day that pertains to light and darkness. The second day will be analogous in contrast. Whatever be the one, the other will contrast. The evening of Earth is given. “And the Earth was without form.” The contrast will be the Earth in form, for morning.

2. To read these allusions understandingly, every sentence must be cosmologically analyzed in the light of our present knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, philosophy, geology, and rhetoric. There is a grand suggestion of progress, couched in the figure of morning succeeding evening. The morning of each day is a complete contrast to its own evening; and yet the morning of that day is only the evening of the day following. The morning of the sun, with hosts of God’s angels rejoicing, is only the evening of the prospective globe, upon whose disk shall be perfected, in knowledge and true holiness, beings in God’s own image. The sun has perfected his day, in which Moses beholds the evening of the second.

3. He is looking at our system, as from the voids of space, as a whole; with its gathered sun and its immense ring of prospective planets. It is now shown him that a change is to take place in the ring, which will result in the form of a globe. To that part of the ring he draws near. The first phenomenon noticed was a separation in the ring between the “waters above, and those below.” The gases thus uniting in one substance, soon left this firmament ring of the sun, and had a firmament of its own, called heaven, or visible expanse. The Hebrew word translated “firmament” implies something tangible, and yet it was used to denote the visible expanse.

4. The first firmament was composed of tangible gases or waters, so called; the second is the expanse of heaven. The cause of the separated waters is seen in what follows. These fluids that evolved out, leaving the ring separated, are now in a condition that they only have to be gathered together into one place to be a sea. It was then steam. The suggestion is that an immense field of oxygen and hydrogen had united by the spark which separated the ring, and as the union was superheated steam, it evolved out into the voids of space as a globe. It is plain then “And God made a firmament in the midst of the waters,” means he made a globe, from which the visible expanse is seen. The vision now places the prophet upon this globe, the changes of which will occupy his attention to the end.

5. Whether any or all the planets were formed at the same time, we are not told. No allusion is made to them except an incidental one, on the fourth day, so that all things should be traced back to God as their Maker. If the union of two gases took out a segment of the ring, leaving it “separated,” it would only be temporary, as the ring would close up again. Whether our planet was the first, third, or last formed, no mention is made. The vision is designed henceforth to unfold what we need to know of Earth, not found in nature. Our globe in chaos of gases, sweeping around the sun in the form of a ring, is evening, being “without form.” Our globe in steam, having a firmament of its own, is in shape, and this is “morning.” Solomon must have given such an interpretation to the account of the second day. Prov. 8:27. Tracing the unmeasured age of wisdom, “Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, while as yet he had not made the Earth, when he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a compass (or circle) upon the face of the depth.” A globe of steam, possibly highly charged with electricity, revolving in an orbit outside the ring of planetary gases, was all that constituted Earth at this time. “And the evening and the morning were the second day.”